The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France

Readers probably know Irène Némirovsky from her best-selling novel Suite Française, published just over 60 years after her death in Auschwitz. She was also a best-selling author in 1930s France, rivaling Colette in popularity. A Jewish Russian immigrant to France when she was 15, Némirovsky lived a precarious life as a Jewish French writer who never became a French citizen. She was often criticized as a self-hating Jew and her fiction as anti-Semitic. Suleiman (C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France, Harvard Univ.; Crises of Memory and the Second World War) sets out to investigate with care and compassion the "Jewish Question" in Némirovsky's life and work. Broken into three sections focusing on Némirovsky's life, work, and two surviving daughters, Suleiman's work employs historical, cultural, political, and psychological context to examine Némirovsky's Jewish identity, the choices she made, and the fiction she wrote. Suleiman's writing is smart and without jargon—this is no dry academic text.